


Kill Me You Hookworm

by JasperIsAFanboy



Series: The Afternoon Light Cuts to Size [21]
Category: Blood Drive (TV)
Genre: Amputation, Body Horror, Gen, M/M, Sort of? - Freeform, auto cannibalism, back at it again w the hard monster body horror my dudes, rated for body horror not sex, sort of it's not a functional limb but nevertheless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 09:42:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14668413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JasperIsAFanboy/pseuds/JasperIsAFanboy
Summary: Or: The maw really doesn't like the Scar, and this time it's not as clean.





	Kill Me You Hookworm

**Author's Note:**

> so i wanted to write more monster body horror in the vein (haha) o 'burrow your way to my heart' but this time from rasher's pov, bc why tf not and also i like torturing myself apparently. so then i did. if u read burrow u know what to expect out o this. also contains a brief cameo from my oc rend, but since he's in this for the equivalent o two seconds i didn't bother tagging him. i think this might take the crown as most disgusting thing i've ever written.
> 
> title from the darkest of the hillside thickets again, from their track 'hookworm.'

Oh, not again. 

Rasher stops and leans against the side of the A/V trailer, one arm curled over his torso. Behind the protective and restrictive shell of the corset, the maw is acting up, grumbling and groaning, the tentacles within twisting and roiling and straining. It feels the way a bad stomach felt before, like his vanished guts are rebelling. He’s only felt like this twice before, once in Heart’s bowels and once during the fourth season, and he knows it doesn’t mean anything good. He wishes he knew what causes this, why proximity to the Scar seems to make the maw panic; if he knew, maybe he could stop it, or at least try to mitigate the effect. He dreads the next few days. He turns to the east, where the Scar rips the land in half, and the maw actually shakes, a shiver like a twitching muscle, before spitting tentacles against the corset. The leather creaks faintly against the strain. An overwhelming urge to run comes from the maw, but whether it’s towards or away from the Scar, Rasher can’t tell.

Once the sick sensation eases, Rasher pushes off the trailer and goes to find Julian. He won’t be happy about this; he’s only just gotten back from Heart, he’s barely started to put the Gentleman’s cock-ups to rights. Rasher being… unavailable so soon will not make that any easier. Rasher does not look forward to Julian being a miserable pouting bastard about it. As he moves through the convoy, a familiar pain ripples along the blackened edges of his skin, right along the hollow of the maw. He groans quietly. It’s faster this time, last time he had a few days of feeling poorly before… The pain flares again, rolling harder through his entire body, radiating from the maw right to his fingertips. A little gasp escapes him as his body sags. He leans against another trailer, breathing hard through his nose. He forces himself upright, decides to skip finding Julian. If he encounters a roadie on his way to his trailer, he’ll send them. He heads straight for his trailer.

When he arrives he sees Rend by the door, his hand raised as if to knock. Rasher can’t fathom what Rend wants, but he’s glad to see him; he’s the first roadie he’s passed. (In fact, he’s the first one Rasher’s seen since the giant showed up. Probably they all took off and hid; they’ve got too much sense to go tangling with an angry bastard that outweighs massive fucking Bjorn.)

“Rend,” Rasher calls. Rend turns. His perpetual pissed-off expression turns to something approaching concerned.

“You okay?” he asks. “You look…”

Rasher knows he looks bad. He’s probably pale, knows he’s clammy-looking since he absolutely feels it, like he’s about to puke. “Get Slink,” he says. Pain washes through him again, and he closes his eyes hard against it. “Get… get him over here. Tell him it’s an emergency.”

Rend frowns. “An emergency? Shouldn’t--”

“Fucking _now_ , Rend!” There’s a sudden spike of pain, right where his stomach should have been and worse than the others, and Rasher almost goes to his knees with it. He groans, face twisting, and has to lean against a light pole to keep upright. He swallows hard. “Go right fucking now, or I swear to god I’ll fucking eat you.”

Rend stares at him a moment longer, then finally, _finally_ turns and leaves. Rasher waits until he’s gone, then half-stumbles into his trailer. He closes the door and shucks off his jacket. With trembling fingers he undoes the corset strings, tosses it to the bed. The black skin of the maw is rippling and bubbling, as if the tentacles are seeking some means of egress from his body and are pushing against his skin. It’s beyond unsettling, and Rasher is uncomfortably aware of what it portends.

“Oh, shit,” he moans. “Fuck. Fuck.”

He manages to get his boots off, then peels off his jeans. As he’s bent over, pain suddenly flares hot and bright like an electric charge in his spine, and he cries out and arches his back as he goes to his hands and knees. He can feel his spine shifting, each vertebra grinding against its neighbors. His breathing has gone ragged. He hears a knock (more of a pounding) on his door and Julian calling his name.

Rasher picks himself up with difficulty and opens the door, lets Julian barrel in.

“What is it, Rend said it’s an emergency but didn’t--” Julian turns and gets a look at Rasher. Whatever he sees in Rasher’s face shuts him up good for a moment. Then understanding breaks clear in his eyes. “The Scar."

Rasher nods. The movement makes his head ache, as if the bones of his skull have come apart and are clacking together. 

“I thought this wouldn’t happen again,” Julian says, as if he’s personally offended by Rasher’s unruly body.

“Can’t say something won’t happen when I don’t know why the fuck it happens at all,” Rasher says through gritted teeth. The pain is constant now, everything from his bones to his teeth to his eyes aching. Even his _fingernails_ ache. “Never said it wouldn’t happen again.”

Julian huffs a sigh and crosses his arms over his chest. “Do you think it’ll last long?”

“I don’t know.” Rasher falls back against the trailer door. He feels like he’s going to faint if he stays standing, so he lets himself slide to the floor. He feels overheated, waves of sick fever-heat hard on the heels of each throb of pain. His vision is going grey around the edges. He sags and falls onto his side. The floor of the trailer is blessedly cool: after last time, he had the carpet replaced with linoleum, partly for exactly this reason and partly because the carpet was beyond saving anyway. He thinks he’ll probably be glad he did, especially if this makes as much of a mess now as it did then. 

He hears another sigh from Julian.

“Anything I can do?”

Rasher barely hears him; the pain is spiking again. God, it hurts just to breathe, each breath feels like glass in his throat and chest. “No,” he half-whispers. “Just. Just stay.”

He hates this. He hates this so much. Dread is curdling his blood in his veins, each moment spent wondering in terror if this is it, if each fresh ache is the excruciating agony of his body tearing itself apart. He’s trembling. He tries to drag himself away from the door, but it hurts to move, all he wants to do is lay on the cold floor. After a few abortive movements, he feels Julian’s hands sliding under his knees and shoulders, feels him lift him up. He hopes Julian doesn’t try putting him in bed, Rasher doesn’t want to replace his bedding and frankly he’d enjoyed the cold linoleum. Thankfully, Julian shows some modicum of sense and just lays Rasher on the floor again, away from the door.

“I’ll make sure everyone knows what to do in the morning so they can get underway without us,” he hears Julian say. “Who should I put in charge?”

“Indigo, Skorpion, Rend, Bjorn,” Rasher gasps. “Just. Find the roadies and yell for them.”

He hears Julian open the door and leave. He groans and curls in on himself, as if trying to protect the maw. He has no sense of time, so he doesn’t know if minutes or seconds pass while nothing happens but the pain. He starts to wonder if maybe it won’t be so bad, maybe he’ll just hurt. He presses a hand to the maw’s lips, and a tentacle curls out and wraps around his wrist, as if it’s seeking comfort from him. He can feel the others pressing against his skin. Then--

A faint plucking sensation from his shoulder muscles, as if someone’s playing the fibers like violin strings. Liquid, stinging heat floods through his muscle. He whimpers. Here it comes. 

The skin of his back splits along his spine with an almost inaudible tearing sound and a gush of blood. Rasher bites back a scream, manages to turn it instead into an agonized whine. The pain is incredible, worse than any tattoo, his entire back ablaze with it. He feels bone stretching, sliding past the rent edges, before cracking and breaking off and falling to the floor with a clatter. The tentacle around his wrist tenses and constricts before shooting back into the maw. His side pulses, throbs, and just as the door opens to admit Julian his skin swells and bursts open to release a gelatinous, mutated arm with too many fingers and not enough hand. 

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Julian cries. He slams the door shut. “You sure there’s nothing I can do?”

“Nothing,” Rasher gasps. The flesh of the extra arm loses integrity, and it sloughs off before melting into the unfortunately familiar stinking ooze. His left leg kicks out straight involuntarily, just as his hip aches and sprouts a spur of bone that pierces through his skin like a knife. He lets out a pained gasp, groans in agony as his ribcage actually ripples, each individual bone pushing against his skin, one after another. He hears a disgusted noise from Julian, wants to ask “How do you think I feel?” but can’t, can only whimper.

He tries to tell himself that he’ll survive this, he’s been through it before and it hadn’t killed him, even if the pain had been so immense he’d have welcomed death. But when his back splits open again, sending him into an arch so bad he thinks he’d break his spine, and spills out a wriggling mess of tentacles, all he can think is how bad it hurts. Every single nerve is screaming. He’s had broken bones, he’s into knifeplay, he’s gotten most of his face tattooed, he even has piercings in his dick, and nothing, _nothing_ , compares to this. The tentacles fall off with wet tearing noises before melting. Dimly he hears footsteps coming towards him, just before a hand strokes his hair, and Rasher doesn’t even try to prevent the pathetic whimper he lets out. Julian’s a self-centered asshole, but he cares in his own way. He can’t do shit for Rasher but be there, and that’s enough. He’d been there for Rasher before, the first time this happened. Rasher reaches up and clutches his hand, even as his own hand sprouts a few extra fingers at unnatural angles. To his credit, Julian doesn’t recoil.

It’s slower to really get going this time. Last time the mutations had started hard on the heels of the pain, had had him looking (as Julian had put it) like the monster from _The Thing_ almost right away. This time they’re starting small, an extra limb here and a cluster of eyes like buboes there. (That had been bizarre more than anything, seeing a fractured view of the world from his armpit.) But once they get going in earnest, they’re relentless. Each new limb grows a new set of nerves, bringing fresh agony as those brand-new nerves suddenly function, and each time they drop off Rasher gets a few nightmarish seconds of the feel of his flesh rotting before the tissue breaks and mercifully cuts the nerves off. He welcomes unconsciousness each time the pain gets to be too much and he passes out, because at least he won’t see a fucking intestinal tract ooze out of his leg, or hear the sounds of his bones splintering and cracking as they reshape themselves to his altered anatomy, or smell the liquified tissue that increasingly covers the floor and his skin. (The stuff makes him think of the true crime books he sometimes reads, the ones that talk about how when a body decays in an enclosed space like a trash bag the soft tissue like skin and organs and fat eventually liquifies. The smell is reputedly horrible and never comes out of clothing. If it’s anything like what his excess parts are melting into, he would completely believe it. He’s never smelled it personally, he’s never kept a body that long.)

At one point he passes out not from pain, but because he looks at himself and sees such a twisted shape that his mind simply can’t fathom that that’s his body and shuts down in shock.

Julian never once leaves. More than once Rasher thinks he hears him choking back vomit, but he never leaves. At one point Rasher comes to and realizes his head’s in Julian’s lap, and wishes he could find either the energy or the functioning vocal chords to thank him. He only whines at him like a dog as the skin of his throat bubbles like tar, and Julian strokes his hair.

It’s not like when the maw transforms his body because he’s feeding it. Then he feels powerful, dangerous, an apex predator that could devour the world and laugh. It lengthens his spine and sharpens his nails and gives him the strength to bring down anything in his path. Sometimes he aches afterwards, but it’s a good ache, a clean ache, and any damage is repaired by the maw thanks to the caloric energy and biomass of whatever he’s fed it. But now he’s vulnerable. He can’t move, because he can’t control his wayward limbs. His innards aren’t merely on display, they’re splitting his skin and falling out of his body. He’s in absolute agony. He can feel his skin stretching, his bones shifting, his organs being pushed aside by body parts appearing where they don’t belong and never were. It’s a violation of the trust he has in his body, that here are his limbs and here is his face and here are his bones. His flesh has turned traitor. He no longer feels he owns his body, though he’s occupied it for thirty years and decorated it as he pleased and thought he knew every quirk of it. He suddenly empathizes with werewolves.

But no agony lasts forever. Rasher can tell the mutations are easing when the sick waves of pain start to slow. Each new limb has increasingly unsophisticated nerves, until a hand grows from his knee and he doesn’t feel a thing. There’s fresh pain each time some extra organ forces itself out of his skin, but it’s a far cry from the agony of his skeleton shifting. By the time he seems to have finished, he’s absolutely exhausted. He still hurts, but now it’s just the ache of overused and stiff muscles, some pain in his long bones like when he was a perpetually-undernourished teenager shooting towards a height of just over six feet. He has no idea how long it’s been. As before, Julian goes to pick him up. He stops.

“Rasher,” he says slowly.

Rasher just makes a noise at him. 

“There’s a… look.”

Rasher forces his eyes open (even moving his eyelids is tiring), and follows Julian’s pointing finger. He can’t even groan at what he’s seeing. A stubby, misshapen arm is sticking out of his shoulder, not unlike the arm of a thalidomide baby. He has awareness of it, but no more than he does from the maw. It’s a part of him, but separate. It’s curled up, as if it doesn’t have the ability to function like a normal arm, which it probably doesn’t. Rasher just closes his eyes and turns his head away. The bones of his neck crack and grind, but he can’t find it in himself to be disgusted. All he can think about is a shower and bed. All he wants is sleep.

“Cut it off,” he croaks. His throat hurts, but just because it’s dry; he’s so badly dehydrated. “Just. Cut it off.”

“You sure?”

Rasher nods, eyes still closed.

“It’ll hurt.”

Rasher opens his eyes and looks at Julian. “So did my skin splitting because a leg wanted to grow out of my ribs,” he growls. The maw’s too tired to do much, but a tentacle lolls out in ineffectual warning. He couldn’t eat anyone right now if he wanted to. (He probably will once he recovers, last time he came within inches of devouring the race. Again. At least the giant’s rampage left plenty of corpses.)

Julian looks distinctly unimpressed and sighs. “Fine, but not here.”

“What-the-fuck-ever, Julian.” He shivers suddenly. He’s freezing, and curls in on himself involuntarily. 

Julian picks him up, covers him with a blanket. It’s not a rough material by any means, but nearly all of his skin is new. The blanket chafes like sandpaper. At least it keeps him warm, and Julian gives off a decent amount of body heat. Rasher buries his face in the crook of Julian’s neck. He’s scarred up this time. Last time, he’d escaped any more-or-less permanent reminders of the mutations, but this time he’s got a scar here and there. One reaches all the way up from his right hip bone almost to his spine, where his side had split open to disgorge a pair of legs. From the tightness of his skin, there’s a scar following the length of his spine. Which, he reflects, might actually look good. Small mercies.

It’s dark outside, but Rasher doesn’t know if it’s been one day or three. The convoy is gone, he sees, just like before. He hopes the roadies haven’t killed each other, or anyone else. Bjorn hopefully kept them all on an even keel; he’s so placid surely he kept the peace. Or maybe Rend just scared everyone into submission. Either is a likely, viable option, which is why he told Julian to find them. Julian’s trailer door is ajar slightly, enough that Julian just has to nudge it open with his hip. Julian sets him down in the shower, and Rasher lets his head fall back against the shower wall. He hears the sound of Julian shedding his waistcoat and shirt, and while normally he'd watch he just closes his eyes. He makes a quiet noise of relief when the water hits him. The hot water goes a very long way to soothing his aching muscles, almost puts him to sleep. Out of curiosity, he tries to move the third arm, tries to uncurl it. But it just twitches feebly. It doesn’t have any sensation, he thinks, he can’t feel the heat of the water against its skin, or the swipe of the cloth Julian’s using to clean him. He hopes that means it won’t hurt when Julian cuts it off. He’s tired of pain for the moment.

Eventually Julian shuts the water off. He considers Rasher with his head tilted and his expression thoughtful.

“Think you can sit up?” he asks. “Might be easier if you’re sitting in a chair instead of in bed.”

Rasher closes his eyes. “Just do it here,” he says. “Easier clean-up. And I don’t think I can move right now.”

“Fair enough.”

Julian walks away, and Rasher lets himself drift. He doesn’t doze off, not exactly, but he’s not entirely awake either. He’s reminded of the bone-deep exhaustion of the first season, when they’d had the whole shitshow running on a wing and a prayer at a manic, frenetic pace that had more than a few of the roadies mainlining speed, crack, Adderall, and occasionally Red just to keep up. The day after filming wrapped and everyone could finally stop to take a breath, Rasher had found the nearest dark corner and passed out. He’d never had to run so hard on so little for so long before. The brief outbreak of fucking pneumonic plague near the start of filming hadn’t helped, and Julian getting killed a few days later had only added to the stress, even if he’d gotten better. It had been a few hours of absolute, solid panic. 

He opens his eyes at the sound of Julian’s footsteps coming closer and looks around at him. He’s got the alcohol swabs Rasher uses for piercing Julian’s ear, a bottle of isopropyl, two of Rasher’s own knives (the thin boning knife and the bigger skinning knife), and a needle and thread. He’s not sure where the thread came from or what kind it is and just hopes it’s not sewing thread. 

Julian presses his fingers to the base of the third arm, where it joins Rasher’s shoulder. He presses all around it, exploring where it joins Rasher’s arm in an attempt to find the bone, assuming there is one. It’s sort of slack-looking, and not the slackness of untoned muscle, more that it lacks any real internal support. Julian takes the hand and pulls gently, and the arm uncurls like it’s made of stiff rubber; it seems to have bones after all, but evidently they’re somewhat soft since the arm doesn’t have much rigidity. Maybe it didn’t have a chance to fully develop before the growths stopped. Might be why it’s still there. Rasher doesn't give the first shit about it, he just wants it gone.

“Are you gonna fucking play with it all night or cut it off?” he asks. Julian gives him a look.

“I’m trying to figure out if it has bones or not,” he says. “If it does, that might make this harder. You don’t have a bone saw.”

“Excuse the fuck out of me, I’ll be sure to remedy that at the earliest opportunity. Do whatever you have to.”

Julian uncurls the arm all the way, lets go of it, and watches as it slowly curls back up. He gets up and disappears, comes back with two belts. He loops one around the wrist and pulls the arm out straight, tucks the end of the belt under his knee. He holds up the other belt but pauses.

“How the hell am I going to tourniquet this?” he asks. Rasher assumes he’s asking rhetorically and doesn’t reply, just tries to stay awake. After a moment Julian settles for looping the belt around Rasher’s shoulder joint, then around his arm just below where the third arm seems to join his deltoid. It’ll probably fail as a tourniquet, but it’s close enough.

“It’s not actually connected to your shoulder,” Julian says, picking up the boning knife and dousing it with isopropyl. He does the same with the skinning knife, then the extra arm and Rasher’s skin. “It has the bones, but they’re not part of the joint. I think they’re anchored in the muscle, but I won’t be able to tell until I start cutting.”

He glances at Rasher, who just nods. He positions the knife, then cuts into the third arm. He leaves a section of it still attached to Rasher. It bleeds, but sluggishly. It doesn’t hurt much. Julian very carefully keeps cutting around the bone. Rasher watches with a kind of sick fascination as he holds the knife in his teeth by the hilt and pushes the flesh away from the bone. The bone itself looks more like cartilage, which might explain its flexibility. Julian considers this for a second, then gives it an experimental tug. Rasher feels the pull, but it doesn’t hurt. Julian then tries to cut through the bone with the boning knife, then the skinning knife; the former barely scores it, the latter works somewhat better just because it’s the sturdier blade. Finally he gets through the bone, after a great deal of sawing back and forth that probably ruined the edge of the knife. The arm comes free.

They both stare blankly at it for a moment. Julian sets it aside rather delicately, then takes up the boning knife. He cuts longitudinally through the remaining flesh and pulls it apart to try to find the end of the bone. Sure enough, it’s sitting with the head snug against Rasher’s deltoid, not attached to anything though the muscle is deformed to accommodate the bone. Julian makes a considering noise.

“What?” Rasher asks.

“The flesh looks different,” Julian says. “See, where I left part of the extra arm, it looks less developed.” He picks up the arm to demonstrate. Rasher doesn’t really see what he’s looking at, it looks about the same to him. A little less bright in color, maybe. “Say something if it hurts.”

Julian starts cutting the extra flesh off in chunks, exposing more and more of the extra bone. Rasher knows he has to remove the flesh, god only knows what would happen if he left it (what if it turned gangrenous or something), but he still wishes Julian could have left it; he’s starting to wonder how Julian’s going to stitch an actual dent in his arm shut. Once the bone’s practically uncovered, Julian tugs it free with a squelch, then finishes trimming off the extra flesh. Once or twice he nicks Rasher’s real flesh, and Rasher only makes faint sounds of pain. By the time he’s finished, there’s a sizable crater in Rasher’s arm, both skin and muscle gone, and it’s bleeding slowly but freely. It shows no sign of closing.

“Why won’t it close?” Julian asks. He actually looks concerned.

“How the fuck should I know?” Rasher asks. “Maybe it--”

He stops when the maw opens and a tentacle oozes out. The tentacle wraps around the amputated arm and slowly retreats. Rasher and Julian both stare, completely disgusted, as the tentacle curls back into the maw, taking the arm with it. The maw closes. They both turn to look in unison to the dent in Rasher’s arm; while they watch, the muscle re-knits itself back to normal just before the skin closes back up. All that’s left is a long, angry-looking scar. 

For a very long moment, neither speaks. Then--

“I just spent three days watching your body grow new and unnecessary body parts and then spit them out through your skin. I run a cross-country rally race where the cars run on human blood. I’ve been to the labs at Heart,” Julian says very deliberately, “and that was probably the most disgusting and ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen.”

Rasher just closes his eyes and lets his head thump back against the shower wall. “Good night,” is all he says. The last thing he’s aware of before merciful, blissful unconsciousness is Julian laughing.


End file.
